Just over half of Americans say they are proud of their national identity as the country approaches its 250th anniversary, a sharp drop from a little more than a decade ago, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute.

In the PRRI poll, 51 percent of respondents said they are either “extremely proud” or “very proud” of being American. Twenty-three percent said they are “moderately proud,” 14 percent said they are “only a little proud” and 11 percent said they are “not at all proud.”

The figures mark a steep decline from June 2013, when 81 percent of respondents called themselves “extremely proud” or “very proud” of their American identity. At that time, 12 percent said they were “moderately proud,” 3 percent said they were “only a little proud” and 1 percent said they were “not at all proud.”

The drop arrives at a symbolic moment. The United States will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. The poll also found that only 18 percent of Americans said they are extremely or very proud of the way democracy is functioning in the country today, and roughly 7 in 10 said they believe the nation’s democratic rights and freedoms are under threat.

Robert P. Jones, PRRI’s founder and president, told Axios the findings point to Americans increasingly inhabiting separate views of the country largely along partisan lines. “Yes, we’re polarized,” Jones said, “but increasingly what we’re seeing is Republicans as outliers, and further and further from the middle.” According to the survey, Republicans were at least 30 percentage points more likely than independents and Democrats to express pride in their American identity.

The decline was steepest among younger adults. Americans ages 18 to 29 were the least likely to say they are proud of being American, at 34 percent. Pride also varied widely by religious affiliation, with white evangelical Protestants the most likely to say they are proud, at 76 percent, followed by white Catholics. Fewer than half of Hispanic Catholics, Black Protestants and religiously unaffiliated Americans said the same.

PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman tied some of the unease to the current political climate, including disputes over free speech and the right to protest. The new poll follows a decade of rising political tensions in the U.S., marked by increasingly heated rhetoric and episodes of political violence on both the left and the right.

The PRRI results echo a broader trend in recent polling. Gallup found in June 2025 that 58 percent of Americans were extremely or very proud to be American, the lowest reading in its 25-year trend and down from 87 percent when it first asked the question in 2001. Gallup also recorded a wide generational gap, with 41 percent of Gen Z adults expressing pride from 2021 to 2025 compared with 83 percent of the Silent Generation. A separate Reuters/Ipsos survey released this week found that about 38 percent of Americans do not believe the country will still exist as a single, unified nation 250 years from now.

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